ALA: Interdisciplinary Thoreau. Deadline: 1/1/12
Recent scholarship in the fields of Environmental Science, Cartographic History, Political Science and Science Studies, to name only a few, have demonstrated that any adequate approach to Thoreau must take into account both the broad impact of his writings and their profound resistance to the hard-and-fast disciplinary boundaries, newly emerging in Thoreau's day, that are so thoroughly enshrined in our own. For this roundtable discussion, we solicit papers that respond to the questions: how do Thoreau's contributions to your discipline unsettle the assumptions of the discipline itself? How do interdisciplinary studies of Thoreau challenge established ways of understanding his life and work? Can we, as twenty-first century scholars with necessarily discipline-bound perspectives, make sense of Thoreau? Please send queries or one-page abstracts (for a 5- to 8-minute presentation) by January 1, 2012, to: firstname.lastname@example.org. This panel is sponsored by The Thoreau Society.